Occasionally during my interwebbing I happen across a particularly stupid advert. Today, I saw this razor advert on Facebook.

Now, there are several things wrong with this advert. The title doesn’t tie in with the text at all. Obama’s razor. How so? Does he use this razor? Did he design it? I’m honestly not sure what Obama has to do with this razor.

Secondly, it ends with “Choose the red pill.”. A matrix reference, I can only presume, but I’m not sure why. “Use our razor, it will reveal to you that the reality you’ve been living in is false, merely a computer simulation, and then your life will change forever as you battle an army of robots!” is the message of this advert? Or is it that you will become Obama if you use this razor? Maybe it’s all search engine fodder, I don’t know.

This is an interesting article, and it’s good to know that there are actually some sensible scientists out there who’re considering that alien life might be a bit more alien than having green skin. But mostly I’m linking to it for this:

“Is it alive? Well, I can tell you that it is not self-sustaining.

“You have to have a graduate student stand there and feed it from time to time, but it is evolving.”

Yes, that’s what we’re for. Feeding things which can’t sustain themselves otherwise. Am I referring to the artificial life, or the universities? Who knows.

Also it wouldn’t surprise me if the wording - “stand there and feed it from time to time” - is actually literal and accurate, and there’s some poor sod standing in one spot all day.

This past week I’ve been struck down by that terrible affliction known as a cold. Usually colds don’t bother me too much, I used to get them a lot and they don’t tend to affect me too much. But for the past five days I’ve felt totally awful. My body has been completely unable to determine what state it’s in; I’ve been alternating between shivering and sweating every 30 minutes or so, can never decide if I’m hungry or have eaten too much, am not really certain whether I’m tired or have loads of energy. Yesterday I felt like my veins were colder than my skin. Having a nervous system is great and all, but when your brain can’t figure out what it’s saying it becomes quite annoying. I haven’t been able to do anything all week. It’s been taking about an hour to work up the energy to go to the shop, which is about a two minute walk from my house.

Today is (or was, since the day is pretty much over now) Valentine’s day. I think I loath it more every year. I would list reasons why but the above-linked post contains a suitable rant.

Also, on Tuesday my grant application got rejected. Which sucks. Pretty crappy week all around, then.

Oh yeah, I yet again decided that I should actually update this website more. Hence this inane post.

It is impossible for me to treat the current economic collapse with anything but a hint of amusement. That’s not to say it doesn’t worry me at all - I was watching the new very carefully whilst waiting for the details of the recent nationalisation and sale of Bradford & Bingley, since I have a savings account with them which contains most of my money. I would not like to lose that, of course.

That said, though, I have for several years treated the very notion of the modern economy and money itself with a great degree of skepticism. A few years ago I wrote a quasi-satirical article for a now defunct website (alas, the way-back-when machine hasn’t catalogued that particular article) giving a brief history of the concept of money and illustrating that it is now, essentially, an un-claimable IOU with no inherent practical value. And that’s in its everyday, physical form, the notes and coins we use (with decreasing frequency). Most money nowdays doesn’t even exist in reality, it’s just represented digitally on some bank’s computers someplace. Which is why the current situation is somewhat entertaining to me.

You see, for the past few months, but with increasing frequency of late, huge figures have been floating around. Figures like $700 billion or £400 billion, and then there’s the collapse of several large investment banks or the fact that certain major UK banks lost almost half of their value in one day. It all sounds very serious, of course. All these massive numbers, sums of money, are almost totally incomprehensible to most people. Actually, the global financial markets and national economies are the only time figures of this scale ever appear (outside of Zimbabwe, where you’ll likely find them in shops again in a few months), and these are things which we in the western world are all convinced are hugely important. But I’m not convinced.

See, although these vast sums of money seem as though they should be incredibly important, and the economic problems will impact everyone by making things marginally more expensive to buy, there’s one simple fact that people overlook. None of this money, these vast sums, actually exists. And even if it did, it would have no inherent practical value. It’s not as though any tangible, useful, physical thing is lost in all of this. Half of your food doesn’t disappear from your cupboard when your bank’s share price halves. So the fact that everyone (that is to say, the media) seems to be treating this as though the very source and sustenance of life on earth is failing seems rather absurd and thus entertaining to me.

The human brain is often a rather useless thing. Or at least, mine is. Up until Friday, I had been without internet access at home for three weeks, which is probably the longest period of time I’ve been without internet for six years. But it’s still only three weeks, and I still had access from my university library - a 30 minute walk, but since I have nothing else to do at the moment, one I made every couple of days - and I’ve been using the internet a huge amount for probably almost half of my life.

So I really don’t get why after only three weeks, having the internet suddenly feels weird. It’s as though I’ve been without access for far longer and I need to re-acquaint myself with everything. For instance, several times over the past few days, I have found myself wishing I had some helpful way to look certain information up, whereas previously curiosity automatically led to opening a browser and checking wikipedia. I’m not sure what should bother me more though; the fact that my brain is so quick to forget things that it’s been doing for years, or the fact that I consider not automatically knowing what to do on the internet to be a problem. It should probably be the latter.

In the least, I suppose it is a demonstration of how quickly it is possible to adapt to such changes of circumstance. Which I suppose could be helpful if anything drastic were to change in the world, like electricity suddenly ceased to exist. Though that seems unlikely.